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The Pope to Scalfari: This Is How I Will Change the Church

Interview with Pope Francis by the founder of "la Repubblica." Published on October 1, 2013 and reproduced in its entirety in "L'Osservatore Romano" with the title: "The light that we have in the soul"

by Eugenio Scalfari

Pope Francis tells me: “The most serious evils that are afflicting the world in these years are the unemployment of the young and the solitude in which the elderly are left. The elderly need care and companionship; the young need work and hope, but they have neither one nor the other, and the trouble is that they no longer seek them. They have been crushed by the present. You may say to me: is it possible to live while crushed by the present? Without memory of the past and without the desire to project oneself into the future by constructing a project, a tomorrow, a family? Is it possible to go on this way? This, in my view, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing."

Your Holiness, I say to him, this is a mainly political and economic problem, it concerns states, governments, parties, unions.

"Of course, you are right, but it also concerns the Church because this situation wounds not only bodies, but also souls. The Church must feel responsible both for souls and for bodies."

Your Holiness, you say that the Church must feel responsible. Should I deduce from this that the Church is not aware of this problem and that you are inciting it in this direction?

"To a large extent that awareness is there, but not enough. I would like it to be there more. This is not the only problem that we are facing, but it is the most urgent and the most dramatic."

The encounter with Pope Francis took place last Tuesday in his residence at Santa Marta, in a bare little room, a table and five or six chairs, a painting on the wall. It was preceded by a telephone call that I will not forget as long as I live.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon. My telephone rings and the somewhat agitated voice of my secretary says to me: "I have the pope on the line, I will transfer him to you immediately."

I turn pale as the voice of His Holiness at the other end of the line says: "Good day, this is Pope Francis." "Good day, Your Holiness," I say, "I'm surprised, I was not expecting you to call me." "Why surprised? You wrote me a letter asking to meet me in person. I had the same desire, so here I am to set a date. Let's see my agenda: Wednesday I can't, nor Monday either, would Tuesday be all right with you?"

I reply: "Excellent."

"It's not the greatest time of day, but would three o'clock be all right? Otherwise we can change the day." "Your Holiness, the time is fine as well. "Then it's agreed: Tuesday the 24th at three. At Santa Marta. You have to come in by the gate of the Holy Office.”

I don't know how to end this call and I let myself go saying to him, “May I embrace you by telephone?” "Certainly, I embrace you as well. Later we will do so in person. Goodbye."

And now here I am. The pope comes in and gives me his hand, and we sit down. The pope smiles and tells me:

"One of my coworkers who knows you told me that you would try to convert me."

It's a joke, I reply. My friends also think that you are the one who wants to convert me.

He is still smiling and replies: "Proselytism is a solemn foolishness, it makes no sense. We must get to know each other, listen to each other, and increase the understanding of the world that surrounds us. It happens to me that after one encounter I have the desire for another, because new ideas emerge and new needs are discovered. This is important: to get to know one another, listen to one another, broaden the circle of thought. The world is covered with roads that come together and draw apart, but the important thing is that they lead toward the good."

Your Holiness, is there a single vision of the good? And who establishes it?

"Each one of us has his own vision of good and also of evil. We must incite him to proceed toward that which he thinks is the good."

Your Holiness, you have already written about this in the letter you addressed to me. Conscience is autonomous, you said, and each must obey his own conscience. I think that this is one of the most courageous passages spoken by a pope.

"And I repeat it here. Each one of us has his own idea of good and of evil, and he must choose to follow the good and fight the evil as he understands them. This would be enough to improve the world."

Is the Church doing this?

"Yes, our missions have this purpose: to identify the material and immaterial needs of persons and to seek to satisfy them as we can. Do you know what 'agape' is?"

Yes, I know.

"It is love for others, as the Lord preached to us. It is not proselytism, it is love. Love for neighbor, leaven that serves the common good."

Love your neighbor as yourself.

"Exactly, that's it."

In his preaching Jesus said that agape, love for others, is the only way to love God. Correct me if I am mistaken.

"You are not mistaken. The Son of God became incarnate to infuse into the souls of men the sentiment of brotherhood, All brothers and all children of God. Abba, as he called the Father. I mark out for you the way, he said. Follow me and you will find the Father, and you will all be his children and he will be take pleasure in you. Agape, the love of each one of us for all the others, from the nearest to the farthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus indicated to us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.”

Nevertheless the exhortation of Jesus, as we recalled earlier, is that love for neighbor may be equal to that which we have for ourselves. Therefore that which many call narcissism is recognized as valid, positive, to the same extent as the other. We have discussed this aspect at length.

“I do not like the word 'narcissism,” the pope said, “it indicates excessive love for oneself and this is not good, it can cause serious harm not only to the soul of the one who is affected by it, but also in relationships with others, with the society in which one lives. The true trouble is that those who are most stricken by this which in reality is a sort of mental disturbance are persons who have a great deal of power. Bosses are often narcissists.”

Many bosses of the Church have been so as well.

“Do you know how I think about this point? The bosses of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and wrongly excited by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy.”

The leprosy of the papacy, that's just how you put it. But what is the court? Are you perhaps alluding to the curia? I asked.

“No, there are sometimes courtiers in the curia, but the curia as a whole is something else. It is what in the armed forces is called the intendenza, it manages the services that serve the Holy See. But it has a defect: it is Vatican-centric. It sees and cares for the interests of the Vatican, which are still, to a large extent, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric vision overlooks the world that surrounds us. I do not share this vision, and I will do all I can to change it. The Church is or must return to being a community of the people of God and the presbyters, the pastors, the bishops with the care of souls are at the service of the people of God. The Church is this, a word not by accident different from the Holy See which has its own important function but is at the service of the Church. I could not have had full faith in God and in his Son if I had not been raised in the Church and had the fortune of finding myself, in Argentina, in a community without which I could not have become aware of myself and of my faith.”

Did you sense your vocation when you were young?

“No, not very young. I should have gone into another profession according to my family, worked, made some money. I went to the university. I also had a teacher toward whom I conceived respect and friendship, she was a fervent communist. She would often read to me and give me to read texts of the communist party. In this way I also got to know the very materialistic conception. I recall that she also gave me the statement of the American communists in defense of the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death. The woman of whom I am speaking was later arrested, tortured, and killed by the dictatorial regime then governing in Argentina.”

Did communism seduce you?

“Its materialism had no hold upon me. But getting to know it through a courageous and honest person was useful too me, I understood a few things, a social aspect, that I later rediscovered in the social doctrine of the Church.”

“They certainly gave a political follow-up to their theology, but many of them were believers with a high concept of humanity.”

Your Holiness, will you permit me also to tell you something about my cultural upbringing? I was brought up by a very Catholic mother. At the age of 12, I even won a catechism competition among all the parishes of Rome, and I received a prize from the Vicariate. I received communion on the first Friday of every month, in short I practiced the liturgy and I believed. But everything changed when I went to high school. I read, among the other texts of philosophy that we studied, the “Discourse on Method” by Descartes and I was struck by the phrase, which by now has become an icon, “I think, therefore I am.” The ego thus became the basis of human existence, the autonomous seat of thought.

“Descartes nonetheless never renounced his faith in the transcendent God.”

It is true, but he had laid the foundation for a completely different vision, and it happened that I set out upon at road which later, corroborated by other reading, brought me too an entirely other shore.

“You however, from what I have understood, are a nonbeliever but not an anticlerical. They are two very different things.”

It is true, I am not anticlerical, but I become so when I encounter a clerical.

He smiles and says to me: “That also happens to me, when I have a clerical in front of me I become anticlerical on the spot. Clericalism should have nothing to do with Christianity. Saint Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, to the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us this.”

May I ask you, Your Holiness, which are the saints you feel closest to your soul and on which your religious experience was formed?

“Saint Paul is the one who set down the pillars of our religion and our creed. One cannot be a deliberate Christian without Saint Paul. He translated the preaching of Christ into a doctrinal structure that, albeit with the innovations of an immense number of thinkers, theologians, pastors of souls, has endured and endures after two thousand years. And then Augustine, Benedict, Thomas, and Ignatius. And naturally Francis. Must I explain why?”

Francis - at this point let me be allowed to call the pope this because it is he himself who suggests it by how he speaks, how he smiles, by his exclamations of surprise or agreement, looks at me as if to encourage me to pose even the most thorny and embarrassing questions for one who guides the Church. So I ask him: you have explained the importance of Paul and the role that he played, but I would like to know which among those you have named you feel closest to your soul?

“You are asking me for a ranking, but rankings can be done if one is speaking of sports or of analogous things. I could tell you the names of the best soccer players of Argentina. But the saints . . .”

'Jest with knaves,' do you know the saying?

“Precisely. Nonetheless I do not want to evade your question, because you have not asked me for a ranking of cultural and religious importance, but on who is closest to my soul. So I say to you: Augustine and Francis.”

Not Ignatius, from whose Order you come?

“Ignatius, for understandable reasons, is the one I know more than the others. He founded our Order. I remind you that from that Order came also Carlo Maria Martini, very dear to me and also to you. The Jesuits have been and still are the leaven - not the only one, but perhaps the most efficacious - of Catholicism: culture, teaching, missionary testimony, fidelity to the pontiff. But Ignatius, who founded the Society, was also a reformer and a mystic. Above all a mystic.”

And do you think that mystics have been important for the Church?

“They have been fundamental. A religion without mystics is a philosophy.”

Do you have a mystical vocation?

“How does it seem to you?”

To me it seems not.

“You are probably right. I adore the mystics, Francis was also one in many aspects of his life, but I do not believe that I have that vocation, and then one must understand the profound significance of that word. The mystic succeeds in stripping himself of doing, of deeds, of objectives, and even of missionary pastorality, and rises up even to reach communion with the Beatitudes. Brief moments that however fill the whole of life.”

Has this ever happened to you?

“Rarely. For example, when the conclave elected me pope. Before accepting I asked if I could be alone for a few minutes in the room next to the one with the balcony over the square. My head was completely empty, and a great anxiety had invaded me. In order to make it pass and relax myself I closed my eyes, and all my thoughts vanished, including that of refusing to accept the office, as moreover the liturgical procedure permits. I closed my eyes and I no longer had any anxiety or agitation. At a certain point a great light invaded me, it lasted for a moment but to me it seemed a very long time. Then the light dissipated, I got up right away and went into the room where the cardinals were waiting for me and the act of acceptance was on the table. I signed it, the cardinal camerlengo countersigned it, and on the balcony there was the “Habemus papam.”

We were silent for a bit, and then I said: We were talking about the saints you feel closest to your soul, and we had come to Augustine. Do you want to tell me why you feel him very close to you?

“My predecessor also has Augustine as a point of reference. That saint went through many experiences in his life and repeatedly changed his doctrinal position. He also had very harsh words toward the Jews, which I have never shared. He wrote many books and that which seems to me most revealing of his intellectual and spiritual inner depths is the “Confessions,” they also contain some manifestations of mysticism but he is not at all, as many instead maintain, the continuer of Paul. On the contrary, he sees the Church and the faith in a way profoundly different from Paul, perhaps also because almost four centuries had passed between the one and the other.”

What is the difference, Your Holiness?

“For me it is in two aspects, essential. Augustine feels powerless in the face of the immensity of God and the tasks that a Christian and a bishop must perform. And yet he was not at all powerless, but his soul always felt beneath what he wanted and needed to do. And then the grace dispensed by the Lord as a founding element of faith. Of the meaning of life. Someone who has not been touched by grace can be a spotless and fearless person as it is said, but he will never be like a person whom grace has touched. This is the intuition of Augustine.”

Do you feel touched by grace?

“No one can ever know this. Grace is not part of awareness, it is the quantity of light that we have in the soul, not of wisdom nor of reason. Even you, completely unaware, could be touched by grace.”

Without faith? Not a believer?

“Grace concerns the soul.”

I do not believe in the soul.

“You do not believe in it but you have it.”

Your Holiness, you said that you had no intention of converting me, and I believe that you would not succeed.

“This is not known, but in any case I have no intention of doing so.”

And Francis?

“He is very great because he is everything. A man who wants to act, wants to build, founds an Order and its rules, is an itinerant and a missionary, is a poet and a prophet, is a mystic, has known the evil about himself and has come through, loves nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds that fly in the sky, but above all loves persons, children, the elderly, women. He is the most luminous example of that agape of which we were speaking earlier.”

You are right, Your Holiness, the description is perfect. But why did none of your predecessors ever choose that name? And in my view, after you no other will choose it?

“This we do not know, we do not own the future. It is true, before me no one chose it. Here we are facing the problem of problems. Would you like something to drink?”

Thank you, perhaps a glass of water.

He gets up, opens the door, and asks a coworker at the entrance to bring two glasses of water. He asks me if I would like a coffee, I say no. The water arrives. At the end of our conversation my glass will be empty, but his will still be full. He clears his throat and begins.

“Francis wanted a mendicant and also itinerant Order. Missionaries seeking to encounter, listen, dialogue, help, spread faith and love. Above all love. And he longed for a poor Church that would take care of others, receive material aid and use it to support others, with no concern for itself. 800 years have passed since then, and the times have changed a great deal, but the ideal of a missionary and poor Church remains more than valid. This is in any case the Church that Jesus and his disciples preached.”

You Christians are now a minority. Even in Italy, which was called the garden of the pope, practicing Catholics are according to some surveys between 8 and 15 percent. Catholics who claim to be so but in fact are hardly so are 20 percent. In the world there are a billion Catholics and even a bit more, and with the other Christian Churches you exceed one and a half billion, but the planet is populated by 6-7 billion persons. You are certainly many, especially in Africa and Latin America, but minorities.

“We have always been so, but the theme of today is not this. Personally I think that being a minority is even a strength. We must be a leaven of life and love, and the leaven is a quantity infinitely smaller than the mass of fruits, flowers, and trees that are born from that leaven. It seems to me that I said before that our objective is not proselytism but listening to the needs, the desires, the disappointments, the desperation, the hope. We must give hope back to the young, help the elderly, open to the future, spread love. Poor among the poor. We must include the excluded and preach peace. Vatican II, inspired by Pope John and by Paul VI, decided to look to the future with a modern spirit and to open to modern culture. The council fathers knew that opening to modern culture meant religious ecumenism and dialogue with nonbelievers. After then very little was done in that direction. I have the humility and ambition of wanting to do it.”

In part because - allow me to add - modern society all over the planet is going through a moment of profound crisis, not only economic, but social and spiritual. At the beginning of this encounter you described a generation crushed by the present. We nonbelievers also feel this almost anthropological suffering. Because of this we want to dialogue with believers and with those who best represent them.

“I do not know if I am the best to represent them, but Providence has placed me at the head of the Church and of the diocese of Peter. I will do all that is in me to fulfill the mandate that has been entrusted to me.”

Jesus, as you have recalled, said: Love your neighbor as yourself. Does it seem to you that this has happened?

“Unfortunately no. Egoism has grown and love for others has diminished.”

This is therefore the objective that brings us together: at least to make equal the intensity of these two kinds of love. Is your Church ready and able to perform this task?

“What do you think?”

I think that the love of temporal power is still very strong behind the Vatican walls and in the institutional structure of the whole Church. I think that the institution predominates over the poor and missionary Church that you would like.

“This is in fact how things are, and in this matter miracles are not done. I remind you that even Francis at his time had to negotiate long with the Roman hierarchy and with the pope to have the rules of his Order recognized. In the end he obtained approval, but with profound changes and compromises.”

Will you have to follow the same path?

“I am certainly not Francis of Assisi and I do not have his strength and his sanctity. But I am the bishop of Rome and the pope of the Catholic world. I have decided as the first step to appoint a group of eight cardinals as my council. Not courtiers, but wise persons inspired by the same sentiments as mine. This is the beginning of that Church with an organization that is not only vertical, but also horizontal. When Cardinal Martini talked about this, putting the emphasis on the councils and the synods, he knew very well how long and difficult it would be to travel the road in that direction. With prudence, but with firmness and tenacity.”

And politics?

“Why do you ask me that? I have already said that the Church does not occupy itself with politics.”

Because just a few days ago you issued an appeal to Catholics to get involved civilly and politically.

“I did not address Catholics only, but all men of good will. I said that politics is the first of civil activities and has its own field of action which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres. All of my predecessors have said this, at least for many years now, albeit with different emphasis. I believe that Catholics involved in politics have within them the values of religion but a mature awareness of them and competence for implementing them. The Church will never go beyond the task of expressing and spreading its values, at least as long as I am here.”

But the Church has not always been like this.

“It has almost never been like this. Very often the Church as an institution has been dominated by temporalism and many members and eminent representatives still have this way of feeling. But now let me ask you a question: You, a secularist who does not believe in God, in what do you believe? You are a writer and a man of thought. So you must believe in something, you must have a dominant value. Do not answer me with words like honesty, seeking, the vision of the common good, all important principles and values, but this is not what I am asking you. I am asking you what you think is the essence of the world, or rather of the universe. You must certainly wonder, as we all do, who we are, where we come from, where we are going. Even a child asks these questions. And you?”

I am grateful to you for this question. The answer is this: I believe in Being, in the fabric from which arise forms and beings.

“And I believe in God. Not in a Catholic God, there does not exist a Catholic God, there exists God. And I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my shepherd, but God, the Father, Abbà, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being. Does it seem to you that we are very far apart?”

We are far apart in our thoughts, but similar as human persons, unconsciously animated by our instincts that become impulses, sentiments, will, thought, and reason. In this we are similar.

“But that which you call Being, would you like to define how you think of it?”

Being is a fabric of energy. Energy chaotic but indestructible, and in eternal chaoticness. From that energy forms emerge when the energy arrives at the point of exploding. The forms have their laws, their magnetic fields, their chemical elements, which combine by chance, evolve, and finally are extinguished, but their energy is not destroyed. Man is probably the only animal endowed with thought, at least on this planet and in this solar system. I have said that he is animated by instincts and desires, but I add that he also contains within himself a resonance, an echo, a calling of chaos.

“All right. I did not want you to make me a compendium of your philosophy, and what you have told me is enough. For my part I observe that God is light that illuminates the darkness even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of that divine light is inside each of us. In the letter that I wrote to you I recall that I said that even our species may come to an end, but the light of God will not come to an end, which at that point will invade all souls and will be in all.”

Yes, I remember it well, you said “all light will be in all souls,” which - if I may allow myself - gives more a figure of immanence than of transcendence.

“The transcendence remains because that light, all in all, transcends the universe and the species that populate it in that phase. But let us return to the present. We have taken a step forward in our dialogue. We have noted that in the society and in the world in which we live egoism has grown rather more than love for others, and men of good will must work, each of us with his own strength and competence, to make love for others grow to equal and possible exceed love for self.”

Here politics is also called into action.

“Certainly. Personally I think that so-called wild liberalism does nothing other than make the strong stronger, the weak weaker, and the excluded more excluded. We need great freedom, no discrimination, no demagogy, and much love. We need rules of behavior and also, if it should be necessary, direct interventions of the state to correct the most intolerable inequalities.”

Your Holiness, you are certainly a person of great faith, touched by grace, inspired by the will to relaunch a pastoral, missionary Church, regenerated and not temporalistic. But from how you speak and from what I understand, you are and will be a revolutionary pope. Half Jesuit, half a man of Francis, a marriage that perhaps has never been seen. And then, you like Manzoni's “I Promessi Sposi,” Holderlin, Leopardi, and above all Dostoyevsky, the films “La strada” and “Prova d'orchestra” by Fellini, “Roma città aperta” by Rossellini, and also the films of Aldo Fabrizi.

“I like those because I saw them with my parents when I was a child.”

That's why. May I suggest that you see two films that came out recently? “Viva la libertà” and the film about Fellini by Ettore Scola. I am certain that you will like them. About power I say to you: do you know that when I was twenty I did a month and a half of spiritual exercises with the Jesuits? The Nazis were in Rome and I had deserted from their military conscription. We were punishable with the death penalty. The Jesuits accommodated us on the condition that we do the spiritual exercises the whole time we were hidden in their house, and so it was.

“”But it is possible to resist a month and a half of spiritual exercises,” he says, stupefied and amused. I will tell him what happened afterward the next time.

We embrace. We descend the short staircase that divides us from the gate. I beg the pope not to accompany me but he dismisses the idea with a wave of the hand. “We will also talk about the role of women in the Church. I remind you that the Church is feminine.”

And if you like we will also talk about Pascal. I would like to know what you think about that great soul.

“Take my blessing to all of your relatives and ask them to pray for me. And you think of me, think of me often.”

We shake hands and he stands there with his two fingers raised in a sign of blessing. I say goodbye to him from the car window. This is Pope Francis. If the Church becomes as he thinks of it and wants it to be, it will be the changing of an epoch.